Sleeping With the Fishes
by ShreddingRibbons
Summary: Stiles is drowning and Derek saves him. But not in a damsel-y woe-is-me way.


I promised this fic to a very nice person when it was still summer and I was not composing complex debates on which historiographer has the BIGGEST DICK and why his dick it the biggest when juxtaposed to the comparitive dicks of other historiographers. so. It's pretty much feelsy PWP, with plenty of SPTKAMC (SARAH PRETENDS TO KNOW ABOUT MEDICAL CONDITIONS) but fuck if I care.

oooooOOOOooooo

He had been night swimming, when everything went to shit.

During the day he'd let the sun brand his skin, stretched out for the world to see on a towel with a tattered novella in hand. The heat was sweet, and sleep ate up his consciousness as he tanned. When the noon cooled, Stiles cajoled Scott and Jackson into a game of beach volleyball, and with each laughing dive the sand licked rough stripes up his back.

They watched the sky burn as night came in with the tide, all wrapped up in towels and sipping White Russians, and then they had made the lazy pilgrimage back to the cabins, the remnants of sun still warm on their skins.

It was a perfect day.

He had gone out while everyone was asleep, feeling oddly private about the whole thing. Stiles' mother had once taken him night swimming, on a trip to a lake in the north. She loved stuff like that; reading in the rain, eating in the garden. He was small and boney and pale, and she had whispered to him and led him out into the playful darkness. She taught him water felt like magic in the dead of the night. Felt like a secret.

So he went out, half trance-like as he wandered down to the beach. For a while he just stood there, mind mercilessly blank, wiggling his toes in the sand and watching the waves froth as they lapped at the shore. Then he waded in.

Sea water, unlike lake water, gets harsh after nightfall. Still, the cold water was almost womb-like, and Stiles sank into it with ease. It felt weird, to be all by himself in such a vast, restless thing. It waxed and waned and leaned against him like it was alive, curling around him with every breaking wave. At first it was calming, peaceful, to be so dark and alone. To be so little in something so much bigger. Stiles didn't know when solitude turned to loneliness, when he felt what he'd been staving off for so long. They were older now, in college, hence the group getaway, but he would still feel it, every once in a while. The twinge of almost-but-not-quite that he'd felt since his mom died. With each fleeting thought the water got heavier. It stopped embracing and started constricting, started _squeezing._

It was a panic attack, but he didn't know it at first.

At first it was just raw terror, each breath rasping, scraping as it entered his lungs. It was so scary because it didn't _feel _like he was dying. Why does everyone say that? _Like _dying. It didn't feel _like _dying. He _was _dying. That was why it was so awful. Your world was ending with such clarity that you couldn't do much but gasp when it was one of the bad ones, the ones that you couldn't handle by yourself. You needed someone talking to you, letting you know that yeah, you were still alive, you just needed to feel their hand and breathe a little slower, that's right. And for fuck's sake, you'd better trust whoever that was with your life, because it was like your soul was in your lungs, and just one slow breath would let it float out, float away.

Halfway through he realized that he was underwater, which obviously made it worse. Stiles figured he must've been thrashing like a madman, but one cannot regulate life-via-gasping while keeping their head above the water line, so at some point he floundered, and went under. Which is a real bitch, since you can't, y'know, _breathe _underwater.

Stiles had fuzzy memory when it came to this bit. He remembered being on shore, with someone holding him straight as he coughed up seawater. It was pretty miserable, all that salt grating away at his throat. But he didn't remember being dragged from the waves. After he'd calmed down, gasping only once every few seconds now, lungs expanding like a dream, he realized it was Derek's face looming over him, eyes red with worry.

"Things were looking pretty bad for our hero there, huh?" Stiles managed between a combination of sharp breaths and coughing, a wayward smile still finding its way to his lips. "Thank you."

The silence afterwards was deafening.

"That was my first one in three years, thanks for asking." Stiles found himself muttering, making as if to stand but sitting back down when the world rolled. "I'm sorry you had to see that."

Stiles was embarrassed at being embarrassed, and that was just…embarrassing. It wasn't anything near as traumatizing as Erica's old seizures, but still. You never wanted anyone to see you at your lowest, when you couldn't even control you goddamn body. The only reason he didn't die from mortification around Scott when they were just kids was because Scott had asthma, and that's almost as unfun.

Stiles was preparing a silent rant about stupid awesome werewolf powers poofing shit like that away when Derek spoke, voice low and tight.

"You scared me."

Whiplash from looking up too fast: it's a thing.

"I heard your pulse spike, and it was like it was my pulse, like it was me who couldn't breathe. I couldn't smell you because of the water," Derek gestured, and Stiles saw his hand was shaking, "and I couldn't see you either. Just-just don't…"

" 'Just don't have panic attacks anymore, ok Stiles?' " the younger of the two muttered when it was clear Derek couldn't find a way to finish that sentence. For a minute the alpha looked like he might reply, might scold Stiles for leaving the house sans a fucking _escort _as if he were some delicate flower who didn't have more scars than he could count and a shotgun in his Jeep, but in the end the werewolf simply leaned heavily on him and breathed in like it kept him sane.

Stiles held the hand closest to him to feel the tremors from left-over adrenaline. "Let's go home. I may have sand in places where sand is not usually desired."

Derek clasped Stiles' hand tight as he pulled him to his feet, and they walked home like that, shoulders bumping. Over the years they had developed a closeness they never addressed, littering each year with heated make-outs like they were bread crumbs. Stiles couldn't even remember when it started, to be honest, just that he'd sometimes find Derek curled around him in the night with no rhyme or reason. Until senior year of high school, he was always gone in the morning. Now there were the college trips; every last weekend of the month Derek was knocking on his door, updating him on the latest Beacon Hills news. The sexual tension was so bad freshman year his roommate had bet him twenty bucks that Stiles and Derek would fuck at least once in his time at Berkley.

When the two of them got back to the beach house the clock the microwave dutifully informed them it was way too late for sane people to be awake. Oddly listless, they half-heartedly scrounged for food, and when they found none, Stiles went up to take a shower to wash the sea away.

He wasn't surprised that Derek was waiting for him when he came out.

Stiles grasped the towel at his waist as Derek leaned him up against the wall, pressing kisses to the hard line of his jaw. Warm hands smoothed down his chest as Stiles gripped at the hair on the nape of Derek's neck, angling quickly up to kiss eagerly against his mouth.

Hazy with lust and an odd sense of relief the two stumbled into the closest empty room, feet suddenly clumsy while their hands and mouths were so sure. They touched and tasted, almost lazy, the moon peering through the curtains and onto sheets. Eventually there was a rough edge to it all, a sharp accent of desperation, but it was a good sort of desperation, with the scrape of teeth and the thrilling scratch of blunt nails on skin.

Stiles arched hard as Derek moved against him, tonguing over the fangs that grew as the level of sweet abandon increased. His hands found shoulder blades and the ridges of spine, traced the endless swirl of the triskele that had haunted his mind's eye for years. With each stroke the pleasure became so acute it was almost pain, and then they were both falling in place, holding one another as they shook.

Eventually, after much pokey-elbow-arranging and muttered promises, they both fell asleep, wound tightly around one another so they could share each breath, each heartbeat. On the cusp of a dream, safe and calm pressed against the firm assurance of Derek's chest, Stiles realized that he now owed an old friend a twenty dollar debt. Whatever. Derek was worth at least thirty, anyway.


End file.
